Electronic commerce, or “e-commerce,” is increasingly prevalent in today's marketplace. Through the use of the Internet, buyers and sellers can securely accomplish transactions regardless of their geographic proximity, and buyers can find sellers of goods that they might not otherwise have access to.
The ever-increasing use of the Internet for both communications and commerce carries with it a constant increase in network traffic and complexity. Companies that do large amounts of business online typically use systems incorporating multiple servers (sometimes referred to as “server farms”) to handle large amounts of traffic.
As a result of increasing amounts of traffic traversing through increasingly complicated computer networks, the efficient routing of network traffic is critical to make the user experience pleasant, insure that secure information (e.g., credit card numbers) remains secure, and provide assurance that communications are not lost.